


Water Damage

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Drowning, Gen, Statement, piles of nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 10:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16554044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Statement of Patricia Hickson, regarding a book found in her son's room.





	Water Damage

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Piles of Nonsense statement challenge.

Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant at the Magnus Institute, recording statement number 0152102, statement of Patricia Hickson, given February 21st 2015.

Statement begins.

I had always got annoyed at our son, about the books. My wife kept telling me to ease off on him. “At least it isn’t drugs!” she’d say, I would _grudgingly_ agree, and we’d have the whole conversation again the next time he came back from town with a rucksack full of paperbacks.

I think it would have bothered me less if he had actually been reading them. We’d done our best to bring him up to read, after all. Rebecca and I have always loved reading - we met at a book club - and we’d wanted Callum to like it, too. So I’d taught him myself, much to the school’s annoyance; they seemed to be of the opinion that it was possible to teach someone to read the wrong way. He’d done the library’s reading challenge every summer. He asked for books every Christmas, every birthday, and we had been only too happy to get them for him.

This was something else. I would have called it a collection, but generally collections have a focus, are organised and catalogued. It was more as though Callum was in love with the potential of the stories between the covers, and to read them would be to find disappointment where his Schrödinger’s favourite book should have been. It was a hoard, sitting in his room in stacks, arranged and rearranged onto shelves that would never be able to hold it all. Cleaning in there was a nightmare. The towers would wobble every time that I so much as thought about the hoover near them, so I told him that if he was going to fill his space, he’d have to keep it dust-free himself, and he did, until he went off to university.

By then, I would have sworn to it that there were more books in his room than in the library, and every time that he came home to visit, there would be a new box of the damn things. He never really came back. Stayed up in Manchester with his new friends, the way graduates do, I suppose. When I told our friends that, they’d given me sympathetic glances and talked about how empty the house gets. Ours didn’t.

Rebecca has always worked long hours, so after he had gone, there was no one to clean his room but me. I managed to put it off until a few months after his graduation, half-hoping that he’d come back and do it himself, but Rebecca started asking if we could maybe convert it into an office where I could do my art stuff, so I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

I started on the stack closest to the window, because there was a patch of mildew forming on the wall behind it, and that’s where I found it. Hardback, a sort of dull blue colour, looked like it might be old, maybe valuable, but that was unlikely given that Callum usually got his from charity shops, and I expect they know more about rare books than me. Although even with my limited knowledge, I _do_ know that books aren’t supposed to be wet.

The blue book was _sodden_ , soaking my sleeves as soon as I picked it up, a shock of cold so abruptly that I dropped it. It hit Callum’s carpet with a dull squelch, and I just stood and stared at it, water running down my hands in rivulets and dripping from my fingertips.

I didn’t want to touch it again, but it couldn’t just stay where it was, so I picked it up the way I would a dog-slobbered tennis ball, and carried it to the airing cupboard, held out at arm’s length. Left it there, decided I’d check the internet for instructions on caring for it later, and then forgot, somewhere in the hours that I spent checking Callum’s room for leaks and his other books for damage. There were a couple of mould-speckled paperbacks, but nothing as bad as the blue one, so I just moved on with my life. Should have thought about it more, should have at least wondered where the water had come from, but once I’d established that the walls weren’t gushing, it didn’t really worry me anymore.

That was the first night I had the dream. And, before you tear this up - I read your guidelines before I came in, I _know_ you don’t accept dreams - I wouldn’t have come if it had ended there. But it’s relevant. As much as I didn’t connect it at the time, I know it was that book.

I dreamed about the ocean. I was sitting, cross-legged, on a piece of driftwood - it might have been a door? It was about the right size, but anything recognisable about it had been smoothed away by the water. It doesn’t matter what it was, though, what matters is that it was floating, so I was floating too, and no part of me was touching the water.

It was quite peaceful, really. The sort of thing that people imagine in those meditation visualisations that are supposed to help you relax. I could hear myself breathing, and the calm water against the driftwood, and nothing else. The sea-blue matched the sky-blue overhead, and I sat and watched it.

I think I was actually starting to get bored, when the door abruptly shuddered. Not like it was about to break. More like the rails when a train is approaching, distinct from its usual movement over the water. I snatched at it, trying to stay on, but it subsided as quickly as it had arrived.

It left me half-lying over the door, splinters under my fingernails and struck by the sudden idea that there was something underneath. That in the water, where I couldn’t see it, there was something large enough to disturb the surface, swimming. And there was nowhere that I could go to be safe from it. There was no boat, nothing larger than my piece of driftwood, though I think now that even if there had been, my mind simply would have increased the size of what it had conjured beneath me. There was no land visible in any direction, just the endless stretch of water.

I tried not to move, but that just seemed to make the fractional shifts of my body with my breathing more violent, the driftwood wobbling under me, threatening to pitch me into the water.

I woke, muscles aching, in the middle of the night, and it was a long minute before I decided that I could move again. Stumbled unsteadily to the bathroom, ignoring Rebecca’s inarticulate sleep-grumbling, with the bleary intention of washing the dream out of my eyes.

The water hit my face, and I was more than wide awake, trying to cough my panic up into the sink.

Once it subsided, I perched on the edge of the bath, trying to breathe through an aching throat. Scratched at my arms, trying to distract myself from the sensations of the dream, and frowned when my fingernails encountered a faint dry tracery of white along the skin. Something to shower off, I thought, but my stomach clenched so hard at the idea of all that water that I forgot to wonder where it had come from.

I would have to get over that, by the time that the hot water came on. Wouldn’t feel right, going about my day not having showered. So, unwilling to try sleeping again, I sat there, the bathtub cold through my pyjamas, and wondered about the dream.

We live inland, but not through any particular design, or long-seated hatred of open water. I’ve seen the sea maybe three times in my life, on holiday when I was little. I hadn’t liked it. It had been too busy, the shallows had shifted under my feed when I had tried to paddle, and the sand got into all the food that the gulls didn’t snatch. There had been no great trauma there that had marked my childhood. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it enough to want to go back. I don’t think about it. It doesn’t sit in my subconscious, waiting for me to close my eyes.

I think, in the end, I concluded that the sea had probably turned up in the background of one of Rebecca’s television programmes, and it was easier to leave behind, once daylight came. I forgot about it enough to shower, just like I had forgotten about the blue book in the airing cupboard.

The next night, there was no driftwood. I was treading water. There was no horizon. The sky was the same blue as the sea, and I couldn’t tell where each ended and the other began. It was all the same great blue monotony. I knew that I could pick any direction and swim in it, and nothing would change. There would never be land. There would never be anything but more of that blue. If I tried, I would run out of stamina, and I would drown.

I tipped myself onto my back and floated, forced myself to put my head back, as much as the idea of something below again rose into my head, made me want to curl in on myself. I struggled not to follow it, to let it pass like the dart of a minnow. Filled my head with the shade of what I assumed was sky.

It took a long time for my vision to lose that colour, after I woke up. Rebecca laughed at me at first, said I was blinking like a mole in the sunlight, but when it hadn’t stopped an hour later, she got all concerned, asked if I was having one of my headaches, if I needed to go back to bed. I shouldn’t have snapped at her. She didn’t know. But at least the knowledge that I had to apologise to her filled my head up nicely, and didn’t leave any room for the sea.

I didn’t want to sleep, that night. Had no solution, didn’t think that there would be one. I still thought it was just a recurring dream, and everything that the internet had had to say on the topic was that there was something that I wasn’t dealing with, but I didn’t have anything like that, nothing that had started in the past few days. So I just lay there in the dark next to Rebecca, trying to focus on the headache that I was developing, to the exclusion of everything else.

That was when I finally remembered the book. Didn’t connect it, just found it coming to mind in the same way as the other things that I’d forgotten - the prescription I hadn’t picked up from the chemist, the chicken that should be defrosting in the fridge.

If I hadn’t been trying not to sleep, I wouldn’t have done anything about any of it. As it was, I climbed out of bed as quietly as I could, collecting my torch from the bedside table, so that the lights wouldn’t wake Rebecca and give her another reason to be upset at me.

I left the note for the chemist on the kitchen table, where I’d see it in the morning. Took the chicken out, stood in the way of the fridge door for far longer than necessary, letting myself shiver back to wakefulness.

The book was still damp to the touch. Nothing like it had been before, but it still wasn’t right. Not after a few days in the airing cupboard. Even Callum’s leaky trainers would dry out in there after a few hours. I took it back to our room, instead of leaving it to get boxed up with the others. I’m not sure if I was planning to read it, but I settled with it in bed, like a younger me would have done, and frowned at it in the torchlight.

I couldn’t remember if it had always been blank. I had only given the inside the briefest of glances before, enough to establish that the ink didn’t seem to have run. And it hadn’t - either there had never been any it at all, or it had long since soaked out. The only indication that it had ever contained any writing at all was a sticker on the inside cover, with the faintest swirl of colour on it. It was still wet on the inside, a waterline marking the pages on the inside edge, as though the binding had been seeping like a swamp.

I closed it again, and set it down on the bedside table with my torch. There was nothing to read there, and my fingers seemed to have picked up some sort of tacky residue from the cover. It was going in the bin, I decided. Callum probably wouldn’t even miss it. It wasn’t as if it had a title that he could ask about.

It should have gone downstairs there and then. Should have gone further, should have ended up in the wheelie bin, or been walked as far away from my home as I could get. Should have been _buried_. But it was late, and my tired, stupid brain still hadn’t worked out that it was the problem.

I shouldn’t have gone to sleep with it right there. I don’t think I intended to, but I lost the battle against my heavy eyelids, wanted to rest my aching head for a second.

The sea was waiting for me, and it wasn’t calm anymore. The great expanse of blue was gone, cut off by the troughs and peaks of waves tore away even the faintest sense of where the horizon might have been.

For the first few moments, I managed a sort of bewildered doggy paddle, and then the water slapped me hard in the face, and I was under. My eyes stung with the salt, and I screwed them shut, trying to seal them like I had my mouth, but my head started to spin. I couldn’t remember which way was up, so I forced them open again. It didn’t help. All that I could see was an indistinct grey-green, hazing off into the distance. Too much and not enough, my hand fading off into it when I stretched it out. I lay there, suspended in the water, for a single heartbeat of calm before the current roiled over me and set me spinning again. My ears popped, and water started to press into my nose.

I wanted to shout, scream, but that would let the air stream out of my lungs in a swirl of bubbles, and I didn’t have enough visibility to follow them to the surface. My head was too tight. Something in it was going to give.

I tried to claw my way through the water in a direction that I hoped was up, but it just seemed to increase the pressure in my skull, the burning in my chest. I shouldn’t have been able to think, but all I could do was remember that great expanse of ocean from the first night, and imagine it pressing down on me, trying to force its way into my lungs. The pressure of it turned my panicked limbs sluggish, as though I was far deeper, deep enough to be crushed under a force that could not be measured.

I thrashed, searching wildly for anything that I might be able to interpret as light, for the surface, tried to picture myself breaking through it, but the image was too far away, and vanished in a flurry of bubbles.

Any second now, I would need to breathe in. My brain would override itself, and in the water would come pouring. Perhaps my throat would seize with the shock, and refuse to let anything else in. Perhaps it wouldn’t, and my lungs would flood. Either way, I was going to drown.

The green-grey went dark, and I thought that that was it. But I managed one last flail of limbs, and they tangled in the duvet, instead of just going still and slack in the undertow.

There was still water. I sat bolt upright, despite the pain that stabbed through my chest at the motion, and it ran off my face, ran down my neck and soaked into my pyjamas. I coughed, and kept on coughing, woke Rebecca with it. I lied to her. Told her I’d knocked my glass of water over, and she was too half-asleep to notice that it was still full.

I wasn’t, though. Once I’d finally managed to clear my eyes, and the sobbing, seizing breaths had stopped, I looked. Saw the miniature waterfall cascading off my bedside table, pouring onto the bed where I’d been resting my head a moment earlier. The book was letting out water with more force than our kitchen tap, more water than should be able to fit in it, even if it had been some sort of practical joke.

I did bin it, then. Would have burned it, but I don’t think it would have worked. I’m not going to say anything to Callum. I’m sure by the time he next comes home to visit, it’ll be dripping onto the rest of the landfill.

Statement ends.

Not much follow-up for this one. Mrs Hickson… wasn’t interested in talking about the incident any further. Which I do understand, given that the… somewhat limited research I’ve been able to do indicates that her son died not long after she gave her statement. Officially, it was ruled a suicide, but everyone I tried to talk to about it was really defensive - they seemed to think I was implying that they hadn’t done their jobs properly? The book sounds like a Leitner, so hopefully the bins were an end to it. Um. End recording.


End file.
